Whoa to Woe

After a month of bliss, I caved in and got a new phone. After all, there are few super() invocations that I want to override (any Indian son/daughter would know what I mean).

The good part about not having a mobile phone was the bliss of being “free”, I suddenly had more time to spend with the person in front of me, I suddenly was charmed by the fact that I could not be disturbed by anybody at the moment and I avoided all the calls that I didn’t care for. Seriously. Try not having a mobile phone for a week. Then you’ll feel the difference.

Even the local DVD store attender agreed:

Attender: Sir, what’s your updated mobile number?
Me: I lost my mobile phone
Attender: What’s the new number?
Me: I am not getting a new one
Attender: Best saar adu (That’s best sir)

I ended up reluctantly getting a Sony Ericsson W830i. The good thing is that I won’t be having it with me all the time. I certainly intend to have some mobile-less days and won’t be carrying it with me all the time.

The phone has a rating of 9.5/10. It is not much different from my earlier W800i but the black color is very enticing. And my latest trip photos were taken entirely using the phone.

My first impulse with the phone was to install the ‘Disc2Phone’ software and try to rip some CDs and transfer it to the phone. Oops. It doesn’t work. I installed it on the laptop and it can’t recognize my phone. I installed it on the desktop and Disc2Phone dies with a bizarre error which no average user can understand (I think it has got something to do with correct .NET version not being installed… why the heck does a simple CD-to-mp3 ripper need .NET!?).

Ubuntu to the rescue. I installed the mp3 codecs and fired up Sound Ripper to convert the CD to mp3, drag-and-dropped the mp3s using Nautilus and I was listening to music on my phone in almost no time at all. I wish I had thought of this earlier, it would have saved the 15+ min installation time on each computer + 10 min of trying to get the dumb Sony Ericsson software to recognize my phone and all that aggravation. I wonder if this software works for anyone at all. Now that I think of it, the software for my W800i never worked as well!

The irony is that I can transfer files to/from the phone only using Linux now since installation of the Sony Ericsson software screwed up Windows so much that it won’t recognize my phone now.

Update: The phone itself is buggy as well. Now it is not keeping track of any incoming/outgoing calls, so if I miss some calls, I have no way of knowing about it! And sometimes the display just shows nonsense, I have to refresh the menu to see it properly. And the location of the keys are horrible indeed. Why such a big button just to open the walkman feature? And the sliding part obstructs the first row of the keys. Sigh. I never had such problems with the W800i. Why do they mess up things in newer versions of the same stuff?

Well, I have a Z550i, and the software doesnt work for me either.
The 2.5x and 4x zoom that you say are digital zoom. ie., it actually takes the picture as normal, and crops the picture around the centre and zoom it on ur screen and stores it in lower resolution. This is equivalent to taking the picture as normal and then cutting out the interesting part out using some image editor.

I hope you’ll still read comments although the post is getting a bit old. I stumbled upon your blog after a google search where I tried to find out how I can get by without the Disk2Phone program.
I am using Ubuntu Linux and I have a SonyEricsson W800.
I am quite new to the whole Linux thing so perhaps that’s why I don’t get this stuff.
Anyhow, you describe using Nautilus. I am a bit unsure about where Nautilus is in my set up. Synaptic clearly tells me I have it, but I can’t see Nautilus listed as an option on any of the menus. Is it basically merged into the file explorer in Ubuntu? Well if so I have had no luck transferring mp3 files into the phone. Photo’s etc work ok but not the MP3. So I am guessing that either you used the file explorer in a different way than I did or you used a different program… There is a small chance that the reason I can’t follow your example is that I have an older phone than yours or that we don’t use the same Linux version. Shouldn’t matter though should it?